“Fueling Revolution” is the theme for the 2008 Ethanol Conference and Trade Show being held August 12-14 at the Qwest Center in Omaha, Nebraska.
The conference officially gets underway on August 13 with morning breakout sessions on a number of important topics, including Protecting Profitability in Volatile Markets, Mid-Range Ethanol Blends & E85,
Current Issues in Distillers Grains, and Cellulosic Ethanol: Feedstock Production, Handling, and Logistics.
Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman will speak at the opening of the general session Wednesday afternoon. After remarks from the American Coalition for Ethanol leadership, a panel discussion on “Innovations in Corn Ethanol” will be held, featuring experts from the National Corn Growers Association, Chippewa Valley Ethanol Co. of Benson, Minnesota, and VeraSun Energy Corp.
A full agenda and registration information is available on-line at the ACE website.
According to the company, Primafuel Solutions will deliver next-generation, market-ready technology solutions to the biofuels industry. By taking Primafuel’s advanced technology platforms to market, Primafuel Solutions is working with customers to facilitate the transition to more sustainable bio-refineries. The team’s initial offering is SMAART™Oil, a down-stream system that extracts more food and fuel from the same bushel of corn.
“Removing the tariff would not lower food prices,” said RFA president Bob Dinneen. “Such an action would halt development of new ethanol technologies and take the jobs and economic opportunity being generated by the domestic ethanol industry to foreign countries. I strongly encourage President Bush to recognize that skyrocketing oil prices play a far greater role in the complex issue of food prices than does ethanol and reject the efforts to remove the secondary tariff.”
Biofuels groups from the US, Canada, Brazil and Europe put aside their differences this past week to present a united front to world leaders meeting in Japan.
Nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, destroying a large portion of the city and trashing more than half of its 370 buses, the city is getting some public transportation fueled by biodiesel.
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has signed into law measures that will provide incentives to biodiesel producers while mandating a rising scale of biodiesel percentages in all diesel sold in the state.
A committee of scientists that helps the government make decisions is recommending that the U.S. keeps working on biodiesel.
Originally created to replace over 100 separate newsletters POET distributed every year, Vital is putting a face to the ethanol industry. Throughout 2008, Vital will base its editorial on four main themes: the future of ethanol, community profiles, industry information and environmental advancements. 
Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary Steven Chalk told the Senate Environment and Public Works clean air subcommittee that keeping the current RFS policy in place is “critical to ensuring growth in all parts of the biofuels supply chain, from feedstocks, to biorefineries, to infrastructure, including pipelines.”
DuPont vice president for technology John Pierce told the committee that the expanded RFS is an attainable goal, both in terms of corn ethanol and cellulosic. “In fact, there are multiple technology developers intending to produce cellulosic ethanol in pilot or demonstration quantities from a range of feedstocks over the next 24 months. The economics and carbon performance of grain ethanol continues to improve as well, as does agricultural productivity and sustainability in the US. These trends suggest that while the RFS targets are aggressive, as they should be, they are not out of reach.”